Punkpost Brand Guidelines: A San Francisco App for Cards Handwritten by Artists

A married couple, a craft fair and a Squarespace test.

Punkpost was a San Francisco card service started by Lex Monson and Santiago Prieto, a married couple who ran it together. In an audio interview published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in its Journeys of Innovation series in December 2020, Monson said that before Punkpost the pair sold do-it-yourself piñata kits and other handmade goods as side projects, and that they were selling piñatas at the Brit + Co Re:Make event in San Francisco in 2015. Prieto, she said, came up with the name.

The idea came from a single card. Brit + Co, the lifestyle site where Monson had worked on the editorial team, told the story in August 2018: Prieto had found a handwritten note from Monson waiting for him in a Boston hotel before a difficult presentation, and wanted to send that feeling back but had neither the time nor a stamp. The two concluded that quick digital messages lacked the weight of something written by hand, and set out to bring handwriting into the app age.

Their backgrounds suited the job. Brit + Co reported that Monson grew up in South Dakota, studied business in Minnesota and moved to San Francisco for an internship at Yelp, while Prieto grew up in Mexico City, switched from business to industrial design, studied at the Academy of Art in San Francisco and spent about ten years as an industrial designer at IDEO. The first version of Punkpost was a simple Squarespace site tested at a desk with an iPad: visitors chose a card, typed a message, and the founders wrote it out by hand. The response from strangers was strong enough, Monson told the USPTO, to give them the confidence to go ahead, and Brit + Co wrote that Prieto left IDEO the following week to learn to program the app himself.

By November 2015 the iPhone app was live. Refinery29 covered a holiday update that month, describing a service that printed, decorated and mailed real cards with a human handwriting each message in ink. When TechCrunch wrote about the app in April 2016 it noted that Punkpost had been on the App Store since the previous year.

Artists, cotton paper and confetti.

The product was simple to describe. A customer picked a design in the app or on the website, typed a message and entered an address; an artist then wrote the message out by hand, stamped the envelope and posted it. Brit + Co reported in 2018 that cards usually went out within 24 hours, and TechCrunch wrote in 2016 that the writers sent the customer a photo of the finished card before it went in the post. Cards could be scheduled up to a year ahead.

The physical card was part of the pitch. TechCrunch reported that cards were mailed on thick 100% cotton paper and that most designs were hand-pressed. Extras could be added: prints of the customer’s own photos, including Instagram posts, and a pinch of confetti or glitter in the envelope. Refinery29 called the confetti a friendly “bomb” and quoted holiday card lines such as “Holidazzling” and “Let’s Eggnog”. The 2016 app update sorted designs by occasion, added an upcoming-events view so users could plan ahead, and added a new checkout.

The artists were the centre of the business. Monson told the USPTO that at first she and Prieto handwrote every card themselves, adding small doodles, and that when they could no longer keep up they posted an advert on Craigslist looking for people who could write by hand. That led them to a community of lettering and snail-mail artists, and Monson called that community a pillar of the company; by the time of the interview the artists were spread around the United States. Brit + Co wrote that artists joined through an application process and came from many backgrounds, from professional designers and hand-letterers to keen pen pals. Refinery29 named the illustrator Anna Hurley among the designers whose work featured in the 2015 holiday update, and Brit + Co credited Yising Chou and Sarah Tate with a small Brit + Co x Punkpost collection in 2018. The company told TechCrunch that its artists had worked for fashion and magazine names such as Kate Spade and Vanity Fair; that is the company’s own description.

Punkpost also built a desktop version for larger sends. Brit + Co reported in 2018 that it was used for holiday cards, wedding thank-you notes and event invitations, and by businesses writing to their communities. The founders registered the name early: the USPTO story says Punkpost became a federally registered standard character mark, protecting the word in any colour or typeface, and that the company also obtained an international registration.

How card publishers and online card services present themselves.

Greeting card brands sell something small and personal, and the way they present themselves follows from that. Card shops lean on the card wall: rows of designs grouped by occasion, from birthdays and anniversaries to weddings and Christmas, with signage that sets the tone before a shopper reaches the shelves. When The Guardian compared two British card chains on the same London afternoon in January 2012, it judged them on range, pricing, staff and the feel of the shop as much as on the cards themselves.

Online card services present the same product through photographs and screens. Each card appears as the company chooses to photograph it, and the design often matters more than the brand around it. Some services credit the illustrators and photographers behind their cards, and a marketplace such as Thortful builds its whole offer around independent creators, presenting the range by maker as well as by occasion.

Personalisation is the shared interface. Websites, apps and in-store kiosks let buyers add names, photos and messages, choose whether a card goes straight to the recipient or to themselves, and see a posting cut-off for same-day dispatch. Several companies describe these steps plainly on their own sites and app listings, together with how and where cards are printed, which paper they use and whether cards are sold wrapped.

Behind the shop fronts sit corporate pages and public records. Company registers show who owns a card business, when it was incorporated and what it was once called, and they can tell a quieter story than the brand voice: a cheeky high-street name may be a founder-held family company, and a young app may sit on a company formed a year before its public launch. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

A punk name on a gentle product.

The name set the tone. TechCrunch wrote in 2016 that the cards had a “punk” edge, with some cheeky designs that set them apart from the traditional greeting-card aisle, and the brand leaned on that contrast: a loud, short name attached to something as quiet as a handwritten note. The look that the press described was hand-pressed paper, lettering in ink, bright confetti and illustrated designs, with each message written by a person rather than a font made to look like one.

The service sold the process as much as the card. The photo of the finished card, the credited illustrators and the promise that a real person held the pen were all part of how Punkpost explained itself. Monson summed up the aim to Brit + Co in 2018 by saying that nothing can replace the power of a handwritten card, and told the USPTO that the company’s mission was to make things that create memorable moments.

Punkpost no longer appears to be trading as a card service. By November 2026 its app no longer appeared in Apple’s US App Store and its web addresses no longer led to the card shop; the company’s blog had not been updated since June 2020. The sources used for this guide do not give a closing date. The brand remains a clear example of the artist-network model, in which a small company acts as the front desk for a spread-out community of hand-letterers.

For a design guide, Punkpost shows how an online card service can make handwriting, paper and a named community of artists the whole of its identity, with the app kept plain so the card does the talking. Compare Paperless Post, an online stationery service from the same decade, and Thortful, a London card platform built around independent creators. For this guide we use an ink blue, a cotton white and a confetti coral with a hand-lettered script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Punkpost’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.